A language instinct?
The matter of controversy is whether the development of the brain is comparable to the development of the vocal tract, or whether this development can only be understood as a biological adaption to language use. In 2002, the American linguists Stephen R. Anderson and David Lightfoot published the book The Language Organ. Linguistics as Cognitive Physiology, where they defend the latter view, which they formulate in the following way (p. 216):
Our ability to speak and understand a natural language results from – and is made possible by – a richly structured and biologically determined capacity specific both